Everyone talks mobile-first. But are you sure that’s the right mix for you. Your best enquiries might still be arriving from a laptop.
Mobile-first has been the gospel in digital marketing for the best part of a decade, and for good reason; most traffic genuinely is mobile now. If you don’t believe me, just think of your own mobile use. But “most traffic” and “most value” are two different measurements, and conflating them is where I see clients make real strategic mistakes.
Desktop hasn’t disappeared. For certain kinds of business, and certain moments in the buying journey, it’s quietly doing most of the heavy lifting.
The clearest evidence for this comes from an analysis of around 80 million keywords by SISTRIX, an SEO analytics firm. Their data shows the mobile share of search varies dramatically by industry, weather sites sit close to 80% mobile, while B2B software and procurement sites are among the few categories where desktop searches still make up the majority (SISTRIX, 2025). If your business sells to other businesses, or sells something people research carefully before committing to, “mobile-first” as a blanket strategy may simply be optimising for the wrong moment in your customer’s journey.
Different devices, different moments
There’s a reasonably intuitive explanation for this once you think about it from the buyer’s side rather than the marketer’s. Someone searching “plumber near me” wants an answer in the next ten minutes and is almost certainly on their phone. Someone researching which accountancy firm to switch to, or which supplier to commission for a six-figure contract, is working through a longer, more considered process, often across several sessions, and often finishing that process at a desk.
Google’s own research with the Boston Consulting Group into B2B buying behaviour in the USA found mobile drives or influences more than 40% of revenue in leading B2B organisations, and can accelerate time to purchase by around 20% through faster decision-making and easier team collaboration (Think with Google / BCG, 2017). That’s a genuinely significant mobile contribution, but notice what it’s describing, mobile influencing and accelerating a purchase, not necessarily being where the purchase itself happens. Mobile does an enormous amount of the early research and nudging. Desktop still tends to be where the paperwork gets done.
The switching pattern matters more than either device alone
Academic research backs this up with harder evidence than most marketing statistics manage. A study published in the Journal of Marketing Research analysed real clickstream data from a large online retailer and found that when customers switch from a more mobile device to a less mobile one, from smartphone to desktop for instance, their conversion rate rises significantly. Critically, that effect grows larger precisely when the perceived risk is higher, the price is higher, and the customer has less prior experience with the product or the retailer (De Haan, Kannan, Verhoef & Wiesel, Journal of Marketing Research, 2018). Although that specific research has aged, it still proves true.
To put it simply, the more consequential the decision feels to the person making it, the more likely they are to want the larger screen, the fuller context, and the slower, more deliberate environment that desktop provides before they commit.
For a professional services firm, that finding is valuable. A visitor comparing conveyancing solicitors, weighing up an IFA, or reading through case studies before commissioning a six-month project is behaving exactly like the higher-risk, higher-price customers in that study. They may well have found you on mobile. They’re quite likely to convert on desktop.
What does this mean for how you build?
This isn’t an argument against mobile-friendly design; that remains non-negotiable; most first impressions happen on a phone. It’s an argument for not treating desktop as a legacy platform to be minimally supported while all the design attention goes to mobile. If your desktop experience is the neglected younger sibling of a beautifully crafted mobile site, you may be under-serving exactly the visitors closest to actually enquiring.
Practically, that means your desktop site still deserves proper investment in the content-heavy pages, service pages, case studies, detailed pricing or process explanations, that a considered buyer wants to read in full before they pick up the phone. It also means it’s worth looking at your own analytics by device rather than assuming the aggregate picture applies to you. If mobile brings the traffic but desktop brings the enquiries, your marketing spend and your site’s priorities should reflect that split in your sales funnel and not the industry-wide mobile-first headline that may not describe your business at all.
To discuss how to optimise your website for both desktop and mobile traffic contact us on 01384 468035 or our contact form.
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